"The graffiti artist who took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls of the social network’s first headquarters made a smart bet. The shares owned by the artist, David Choe, are expected to be worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year.

The payout to Mr. Choe, the graffiti artist, could provide more money from his paintings than Sotheby’s attracted for its record-breaking $200.7 million auction in 2008 for work by the artist Damien Hirst.

In 2005, Mr. Choe was invited to paint murals on the walls of Facebook’s first offices in Palo Alto, Calif., by Sean Parker, then Facebook’s president. As pay, Mr. Parker offered Mr. Choe a choice between cash in the "thousands of dollars," according to several people who know Mr. Choe, or stock then worth about the same amount.

Mr. Choe, who has said that at the time that he thought the idea of Facebook was "ridiculous and pointless," nevertheless chose the stock.

Many "advisers" to the company at that time, which is how Mr. Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company, according to a former Facebook employee. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $100 billion. Mr. Choe’s payment is valued at roughly $200 million, according to a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives."

yeah, facebook will debut at a bunch of money and that dude should sell his shares. but the pendulum will fall back, and people will become more aware of privacy concerns as more of it gets stripped away. it's bound to happen (and, in some circles, already is). the facebook ipo will get a few people very rich, sure. but everything ends, and for as much disdain as there is towards facebook, it'll all fall apart eventually.

Facebook user base growth will come to a grinding halt this year.And so with a user base of 845 million people, they will finally have to actually monetize that user base.

I believe that for the immediate future, they'll be able to continue to swindle advertisers and media companies desperate to stay afloat - thanks to all the uber hype. But once the reality comes out that Facebook hasn't actually helped most of the advertisers' bottom line, the shit will hit the fan.